Kate Helfrich:
Foodways and Community Cookbooks at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Thursday, August 9th, 7-8 pm

Cookbooks tell us more than just how to fix dinner. Commercial, single author, and community cookbooks each offer a different lens through which to view food and foodways–the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.   Community cookbooks offer a distinctly unique view of how foodways develop.  As historical documents these cookbooks allow us to peer through the kitchen window and trace how food and foodways have changed over time.  This presentation will look at community cookbooks as historical documents that reveal how cooking and eating changed at the turn of the century as urbanization and agro-industrialization took hold in California.

Kate Helfrich is a career educator who has recently finished a Master’s Thesis on community cookbooks and how foodways changed at the turn of the century in northern California. She has taught about food and nutrition at many levels.  She is currently involved in a new initiative to create a foodways alliance in California similar to The Southern Foodways Alliance and Foodways Texas.

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